Abstract
A retrospective observational study carried out in the United States showed a decrease in survival in patients treated for breast, prostate, lung and colorectal cancer with complementary medicines. We verified this result with a French population of consecutive 636 patients diagnosed with the same cancer and treated with oral chemotherapy in an hospital for three years. An interview by a pharmacist before the administration of oral chemotherapy was made to identify the complementary medicines used by the patients. We compared the overall survival using a log-rank test by stratifying the groups (number of cancers, number of comorbidities, age, sex). The results show no significant difference in survival between the group of 191 patients declaring that they use complementary medicines and the group of 445 patients declaring that they do not use (p=0.126). A descriptive analysis of the 256 mentioned complementary medicines suggests that French patients use non-pharmacological interventions to alleviate cancer-associated symptoms and side effects of antineoplastic treatments, and not alternative medicine prompting patients to refuse conventional treatments compared to United States.